Tag Archives | Finance

from Knowledge@Wharton (via Forbes) Venture capital firms are in the business of funding promising entrepreneurs. The conventional wisdom, which some say has fallen by the wayside as older firms have matured, is that returns are better when VC firms are entrepreneurial–nimble, forward-looking, well-connected and armed with an appetite for risk. A new crop of investors–dubbed […]

from Forbes The trouble in the commercial real estate markets is getting ugly, as the precarious situation of Dubai World has made all too clear. Expect many more unpleasant situations like that one. Speculative-grade debt issuers are bracing for the default rate to hit 12% to 14% by the end of 2009, according to our […]

from Fortune Dubai’s not the only onetime highflier that risks drowning in debt. The Middle East city-state’s investment arm, Dubai World, is working with creditors to restructure $26 billion of debt it took on in a multiyear, global property binge. Last week, markets briefly panicked after the firm signaled that it couldn’t make its debt […]

from NYTs EVERY once in a while, if only for sanity’s sake, it is wise to leave our bankrupt era behind and seek out a bit of wisdom from a moral authority. It’s a challenging exercise, given that so many formerly stellar reputations are now shipwrecked and that all those once-smart guys and gals have […]

from Knowledge@Wharton Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke called for a broad reworking of regulations governing the financial system to guard against catastrophic meltdowns like the one that has hobbled the global economy since late 2007. In remarks (full text) today before the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., the Fed chairman said: “We must […]

from YaleGlobal Online Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator and Associate Editor for the Financial Times, talks about his new book “Fixing Global Finance,” and the current financial crisis. In this interview with Nayan Chanda, editor of YaleGlobal, Wolf explains why global imbalances caused the financial crises, outlines the steps for ending this destructive cycle, and […]

from YaleGlobal Online As the United States bails out banks and shoe-factories close their doors in China, should the two governments worry about exchange rates? The question arose after Timothy Geithner, new US treasury secretary, suggested in a congressional hearing that China is “manipulating” the value of its currency. China then fired back, echoed by […]

from YaleGlobal Online The six month-old global financial crisis has already claimed many victims in the financial world and this week felled the first government – of Iceland – for its failure to cope with the crisis. In China, the government’s efforts to respond to the domestic crisis visible in millions of job losses and […]

from The Atlantic Well, we did it again. Only eight years after the last big financial boom ended in disaster, we’re now in the migraine hangover of an even bigger one—a global housing and debt bubble whose bursting has wiped out tens of trillions of dollars of wealth and brought the world to the edge […]

from The Atlantic Americans know that China has financed much of their nation’s public and private debt. During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama and John McCain generally agreed on the peril of borrowing so heavily from this one foreign source. For instance, in their final debate, McCain warned about the “$10 trillion debt we’re giving […]

from BW.com As if they haven’t done enough damage. Thousands of subprime mortgage lenders and brokers—many of them the very sorts of firms that helped create the current financial crisis—are going strong. Their new strategy: taking advantage of a long-standing federal program designed to encourage homeownership by insuring mortgages for buyers of modest means. You […]

from Portfolio.com The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong. To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice […]

from Forbes Considering that Forbes estimates Mark Cuban’s net worth at $2.6 billion, the two most notable features about the insider trading complaint that the Securities and Exchange Commission filed this morning may be the amount–a mere $750,000–and the motive. Unlike the Gordon Gekkos of the world, Cuban’s alleged misconduct was not part of a […]

from NYTs Facing the gravest economic crisis in decades, the leaders of 20 countries agreed Saturday to work together to revive their economies, but they put off thornier decisions about how to overhaul financial regulations until next year, providing a serious early challenge for the Obama administration. Though the countries’ stimulus packages were cast as […]

from Futurepundit Tired of waiting for solar photovoltaics costs to finally drop? Looks like the wait is almost up. Average Selling Prices (ASPs) of solar photovoltaic modules are expected to decline 20% in 2009 and 25% in 2010. After subsidies, Plan B for module makers is to sell products at a discount to keep inventory […]

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.
- ERNEST HEMINGWAY

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries … and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.
- NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.
- PAUL VIRILIO

We are surrounded by the wondrous effects of machines and are encouraged to ignore the ideas embedded in them. Once a technology is admitted it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do. Our task is to understand what that design is—that is to say, when we admit a new technology to the culture, we must do so with our eyes wide open.
- NEIL POSTMAN, TECHNOPOLY

You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it.
- ROBIN WILLIAMS

Creativity is relational. Its practice is most about casting widely and connecting disparate dots of existing knowledge in new, meaningful ways. To be creative, you’ve got to mine knowledge. You have to know your dots.
- BRUCE NUSSBAUM

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.
- CHARLES DARWIN

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
- EDWARD SNOWDEN

You invade my privacy, it’s nothing. I try to get it back, it’s a crime. You’ll never understand... it’s not that I have nothing to hide... I have nothing I want you to see.
- THE GIRL, ANON

Be a nuisance where it counts. Do your part to inform and stimulate the public to join your action. Be depressed, discouraged and disappointed at failure and the disheartening effects of ignorance, greed, corruption and bad politics... but never give up.
- MARJORIE STONEMAN DOUGLAS

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
- MAHATMA GANDHI

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
- ALICE WATERS

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
- THEODORE ROOSEVELT